Outsourcing Cyber Security: The Benefits of Augmenting Your IT Department

Cyber criminals cause a lot of problems for organizations, from locking down critical files through ransomware to using social engineering to get access too sensitive data. You know that you need to minimize your cyber security risks, but choosing the best options for your needs may be challenging. Outsourcing your cyber security may be exactly what you need. Here are five benefits you receive when you have a specialized provider helping your IT department with hardening your defenses against threats.

1. Lower Cost. No Salaries

The salary of cyber security professionals is a major roadblock when it comes to bringing them in-house. They are in-demand and the supply is low, leading to a recruiting environment that is costly and time-consuming. When you work with a cyber security provider, you reduce your costs because you don’t have to worry about salaries. Instead, you have a fixed monthly price that’s not going to suddenly spike when massive enterprises do aggressive recruiting campaigns for their IT security teams.

You also reduce your indirect costs, such as the time and resources that the HR team would otherwise spend on finding and interviewing candidates. The cyber security service provider is the one going through the process of finding experts that are capable of addressing the needs of your organization. Your HR team and hiring managers can focus on recruiting for other parts of the company and building around the fact that you have IT security professionals readily available from the service provider.

2. Immediately Gain a Team of Experts with Knowledge

When you bring in a cyber security provider, you end up with specialists who have spent a lot of time addressing cyber threats in many types of business environments. They take educational opportunities to discover the latest cyber security best practices, how to solve the changing needs of modern businesses and the newest solutions on the market.

You have access to many experts, rather than relying on a handful of full-time employees. They have more flexibility due to the amount of hands-on experience they have, compared to a single person who may have only worked in one or two environments. This background is particularly useful when it comes to proactively responding to potential breaches and quickly taking action following an intrusion.

3. Gain Outside Perspective

Sometimes it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. Your in-house IT team knows your infrastructure inside and out, which can sometimes prevent them from seeing potential cyber security issues or identifying solutions that could improve overall protection.

The cyber security managed service provider delivers an outside perspective that’s built with hundreds or thousands of hours of experience with a variety of business environments. They may have innovative solutions that are tried and tested against the latest threats.

The in-house IT team may have its attention divided between user support, development, maintenance and hundreds of other tasks outside of cyber security. They don’t always have the opportunity to go to workshops or read the latest news in the cyber security world. Since a cyber security service provider is entirely focused on this part of the technology world, they have the time to keep up with cutting-edge developments.

4. Full Proof Gap Analysis and Remediation Plans

Do you know exactly what’s missing with your company’s cybersecurity measures? Outsourced cyber security can find the vulnerabilities that put you at risk of an attack, whether you’re missing a critical piece of defense or your policies fail to address cyber security. They work with you to develop a remediation plan that meets NIST cyber security standards so that you can minimize your risk profile.

This process is not one-and-done. Security standards and regulations frequently change, especially as new technology comes out. When you’re proactive about working with a security team to identify the gaps in your defenses, you stay ahead of potential attackers and keep your infrastructure protected.

5. Scale Your IT Security Team on Demand

The amount of risk that your organization faces varies based on many factors. For example, if you’re gearing up for a large expansion, you may be more vulnerable to opportunistic attacks. Another situation that could create a weaker environment is immediately following a data breach. Until you know how the hackers got in, you don’t have a way to fix the exploit to prevent a repeat attack.

Outsourced cyber security streamlines the process of scaling your IT security team as needed. You don’t always need an increased number of specialists on hand, but they’re invaluable during riskier situations. Once this period has passed, you can ramp back down to the level of service you used previously. That’s a lot easier than hiring and firing a bunch of in-house employees every time you think you’re going to have increased cyber security needs.

Your IT department has to deal with a constantly changing cyber security landscape, where new threats are waiting just around the corner. They don’t always have the resources required to respond appropriately. By augmenting your in-house IT team with outsourced cyber security services, you give them exactly what they need to keep things secure.